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Australian Broadcasting Corporation science communicator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has received a prize for making people laugh ...and then making them think.

Dr Karl received a prestigious Ig Nobel Prize before an excited crowd of 1200, including three Nobel Laureates at a gala ceremony at Harvard University last night.

The award was for the online Belly Button Lint Survey, which sought to answer two important questions posed by listeners to Dr Karl's science radio show: What exactly is belly button lint and why is it almost always blue?

A comprehensive questionnaire was posted on Karl's website and 4799 responses were received from around the world. Many people mailed actual lint samples to Karl's Sydney University office. The results were collated and the lint examined with an electron microscope. The results, published online, included the startling conclusion that "You are more likely to develop belly button lint if you are male, older, hairy, and have a non-protruding navel (i.e. an "innie" not an "outie")".

The Ig Nobel Prizes honour people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced."

According to Marc Abrahams, editor of science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) which is the main sponsor of the Ig Nobel Prize, this "covers a lot of ground".

The Ig Nobel Prize web site states that "every winner has done something that first makes people laugh, then makes them think" and are "intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

"It says nothing as to whether a thing is good or bad, commendable or pernicious," says Abrahams.

The world seems to enjoy classifying things as being either one or the other, he says, and prizes generally "sanctify the goodness or badness of the recipients".

"The Ig Nobel Prize isn't like that. The Ig, as it is known, honours the great muddle in which most of us exist much of the time. Life is confusing. Good and bad get all mixed up," he says.

About half are awarded for things people find "commendable, if perhaps goofy," says Abrahams. The other half go for things that are, in some people's eyes, "less commendable."

"All such judgements are entirely up to each observer," he says.

Only two other Australians have ever won the award in an area of science. John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, received an Ig Nobel for patenting the wheel in the year 2001. The Australian Patent Office was a joint winner for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

Dr Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia also won an award for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit.

Other recent awards were for a medical report entitled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts" published in a 1984 issue of the Journal of Trauma and one for a partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.

In the area of astrophysics an award was given for the discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. In medicine, Dutch researchers were awarded for their illuminating report, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal."

In physics, a calculation on how to make a teapot spout that does not drip was awarded. In the chemistry category, there was a Japanese infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.

Among the more high profile recipients of the award was Jacques Benveniste of France who was awarded the chemistry prize twice for his work on homoeopathy - for discovering that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.

Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, was awarded for his "unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness". As was Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to "stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings".

The Ig Nobel Prize is co-sponsored by the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.